Super Mario Run Draws Complaints for Gobbling Up Data

[Maura]

Just as expected, Super Mario Run raced to the top of the Top Grossing and Top Free app charts quicker than Mario runs up a flagpole, with AppleInsider reporting that demand for the app was so strong at launch that it even crashed the App Store for a short time.

However, as much fun as the game is to play, that doesn’t mean that there hasn't been a variety of complaints following its release, including those who say that it is too expensive to unlock the whole game, or doesn’t take long enough to complete.

Possibly one of the biggest complaints is the fact that the game’s always-on internet connection uses up lots and lots of data. However, this might only be a temporary problem, as AppleInsider reports that due to overloaded servers, some users were finding that the app kept trying to re-download itself, thus bumping up the usual data usage up to around 150 megabytes per hour rather than the average (and still very high!) 75 megabytes of data. In contrast, Pokémon Go uses up on average 30 megabytes per hour.

“The game is chatty,” engineering sources in the App Store told AppleInsider. “Nintendo’s doing a lot of fat-packet data shuffling back-and-forth to its own back-end, and if a packet fails, it’ll keep trying for a bit until it gives up and errors out. This is all data use.”

Sources: http://appleinsider.com/articles/16...e-from-persistent-internet-in-super-mario-run

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16...t-grossing-free-app-charts-hours-after-launch

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16...r-mario-run-service-unavailable-to-some-users